Disintegrating boy bands, canonical works of fiction and the secret worlds of reclusive billionaires are all fertile starting points for movie scripts. Yet no episode category in the four-year run of Be Reel has seemed to lose the thread of its subject matter faster than this one.
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This week, we dive into the one-inch pool—usually relegated to LiveJournal and Wattpad—of movies based on fan-fiction: writing that starts out reimagining the characters of more popular sources and, apparently, ends by pushing them into sex.
Sometimes these sources are Jane Austen novels, sometimes alternate histories of One Direction. While fan-fiction is nothing new to online communities and book publishing, its relationship to the movies is a short and rocky one. Chronologically, our case study begins with this genre’s much-criticized urtext “Fifty Shades of Grey” (2015) and moves on to the shameless mashup “Pride & Prejudice & Zombies” (2016).
But the new romance film “After” (based on the YA smash hit by Anna Todd) is our true jumping-off point. To break it down, we’re joined by Kathleen Newman-Bremang of Refinery29 to assess the problematic romances of YA literature and why a movie so full of sex isn’t particularly sexy.
Ultimately, this episode of Be Reel poses the obvious, yet impossible question: If readers loved your fan-fic because it depicted explicit sex between figures from One Direction or “Twilight” and you’ve cut both of those things from your movie, what is your film? Answers below.